Is Traditional eLearning Course Development, Rapid Enough?

Companies are getting more agile, and training (whether it is traditional classroom training or eLearning), must be more agile as well. It’s true that eLearning is a huge improvement over traditional classroom training and is efficient and impressive in its own right; however, is it agile enough to contribute to the synergistic effect that comes about from departments working in harmony? Can eLearning meet the training requirements of all departments at the speed at which it is needed? Is it rapid enough? Consider the following eLearning development facts:

The development time of an eLearning course can be up to 2-3 months. Waiting for months on end, to get a training program out, is out of the question.

This timescale is fine for courses with a long shelf-life, but in more and more cases, industries are demanding specific courses, to fulfill a specific need – in weeks instead of months.

Some instances when this becomes necessary are listed here:

Product Training

Updating existing product training courses, on new features

Creating courses on recently-launched products

Compliance Training

Updating compliance courses on existing rules and new rules

Rolling out a compliance course, simultaneously, in multiple languages

New Hire Training

Rolling out a video message to new hires, from the CEO

Notice that the common factors in all the trainings mentioned above include:

‘Uncertainty’ in varying degrees

Room for more knowledge on an ongoing basis

A short shelf-life of these courses

There is a solution. It’s called Rapid eLearning. Rapid eLearning, as the name suggests, is a way to develop eLearning courses, rapidly. Unlike traditional eLearning that we have been talking about thus far, rapid eLearning development cuts the time taken to create a course by more than 40%. This is because:

So, from taking months to develop a course with traditional eLearning, courses can now be developed in a matter of weeks. This is a huge improvement from traditional eLearning, and a major factor that comes into play when creating courses that must be created rapidly, to fulfill immediate requirements.

‘Predictability’ and ‘planning’, which are the characteristics of a course with a long shelf-life (like leadership training for instance), cannot be created rapidly. But, with the rate of change in industries today, courses with a long shelf-life are becoming far and few between. This makes it even more necessary for organizations to be able to quickly develop courses with a short shelf-life.

As organizations continue to seek disruptions and develop futuristic scenarios that will help them surge ahead of their competition, at full throttle, rapid eLearning is (and will continue to be), the solution to seek.